1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data transfer and, more particularly, to systems and methods that use address aliases for packet prioritization.
2. Description of Related Art
Network devices, such as routers, receive data on physical media, such as optical fiber, analyze the data to determine its destination, and output the data on physical media in accordance with the destination. The traffic through a router may broadly fall into two categories: low priority traffic and high priority traffic. Low priority traffic includes best-effort traffic with no service guarantee (i.e., the traffic has no guarantee on latency). High priority traffic includes traffic with strong guarantees on latency, such as voice traffic. High priority traffic may be guaranteed a maximum latency even when the router is congested with low priority traffic.
Conventional routers typically include a series of queues and staging buffers (e.g., first-in, first-out (FIFO) memories) that can fill up with long low priority packets. As a result, conventional routers generally include mechanisms to permit high priority packets to bypass low priority packets wherever congestion can occur so that high priority packets do not get delayed due to low priority packets.
For example, a router may include separate sets of queues and staging buffers for high priority packets, thereby permitting high priority packets to bypass congestion caused by low priority packets. Arbiters in the router may then be programmed to select high priority packets over low priority packets. Because the rate at which high priority packets enter the router may be set based, for example, on a service level agreement, the latency through the router can be guaranteed for high priority packets. A problem with this approach is that it is expensive because it requires extra logic for handling multiple priority levels and dedicated high priority queues and staging buffers throughout the router.
As a result, there is a need for a less expensive alternative that guarantees an amount of latency through a network device for high priority packets, regardless of any congestion caused by low priority packets.